Able One (29 page)

He heard Colonel Christopher call to O’Banion, “Where are those fighters, Brick?”

“Coming up fast, ma’am. They haven’t gone supersonic, but they’re pulling in closer.”

“Jon, keep us on a course that parallels the coast. I don’t want to get any closer.”

“Yes, Colonel,” Lieutenant Sharmon replied.

Christopher toggled the intercom and said, “Mr. Hartunian, you and your people better strap in. We’ll be in action any minute now.”

Hartunian’s voice answered, “Seat belts. Yeah.”

Kaufman spoke up. “You’ll have to swing around and point us at the coast when they launch.”

“I know, Obie. I just don’t want to give those fighters any excuse to open up on us until I have to.”

“But you have to be pointing at the missiles when they launch. Point the nose at them and--”

“And let the tech geek’s laser system acquire them. I know. I flew the simulator, Obie. I just don’t want those fighters to shoot us down before we nail the missiles.”

Kaufman stared at her. She looked like a little kid, sitting in the pilot’s chair with the safety harness over her shoulders and the big white flight helmet sitting on her head like some ostrich egg.

He knew he shouldn’t say it, but Kaufman didn’t care anymore. What the hell, he thought, we’re going to get our asses shot off anyway.

So he said, “Maybe I should take over now. I’ve had more experience handling this bird. I can--”

“No.”

“But you don’t--”

The look on Colonel Christopher’s face could have etched solid steel. “Obie, I’m the pilot here. That’s that. No further discussion.”

He wanted to spit. But instead he shrugged inside his safety harness and said nothing. The plane droned on for a few moments, then Christopher asked mildly, “You ever read
Moby-Dick,
Obie?”

Puzzled, he replied, “Saw the movie, I think.”

“You remember where Ahab tells his first mate, ‘There’s one God in heaven and one captain of the
Pequod.’ ”

Kaufman felt his cheeks redden with anger.

“That’s the way it’s got to be, Obie. I didn’t ask for this job, but I’ve got it. Now let’s do what we’re here to do.”

O’Banion’s voice crackled in his earphone, “Message incoming from the gooks, Colonel.” “Let’s hear it.”

The same calm, reedy voice they had heard before said, “Unidentified aircraft, this is Air Defense Command of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. You have invaded DPRK airspace. You will follow the two fighter planes we have dispatched and land at their base. If you fail to do so, they have orders to shoot you down. They are armed with air-to-air missiles. You will execute this order now.”

San Francisco: The Cow Palace

Vickie leaned her elbows on her knees and peered down at the platform where the President was supposed to speak.

“How long is it going to be?” she asked no one in particular. “These seats hurt my backside.”

Sylvia tried to smile at her elder daughter. “Just be patient. It’s not every day you get to see the President of the United States in person.”

“With ten zillion other people,” Vickie muttered.

“I think it’s cool,” said Denise, sitting on Sylvia’s other side. “Nobody else from my class is here, I bet.”

“So what?” said Vickie, with the airy disdain of the senior sibling. “He’s a drip, anyway.”

“He’s the President!” Sylvia snapped, shocked. “Show some respect.”

“He said he was going to do a lot for education,” Vickie retorted. “I haven’t seen any improvements. Have you, Dee?”

Denise thought a moment, then replied, “Well, we got more money for the school orchestra.”

“Big deal.”

“They were going to have to close it down altogether,” Denise pointed out.

“But it wasn’t federal money,” Vickie countered. “That extra money came from Sacramento.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

Sylvia swiveled her head right and left as the sisters argued back and forth, suppressing an urge to grab the two of them by the scruffs of their necks and rap their skulls together.

Norman Foster appraised his boss with an experienced eye. He’s winding himself up tighter, thought the President’s chief of staff. He gets high on moments like this. The crowd, the cameras, the band playing and people getting to their feet and cheering: hell, it gives me a thrill; it’s positively invigorating for him.

The President was pacing briskly up and down the little bare-walled room where they waited for the ceremonies to begin. Senator Youmans was beside him, scurrying breathlessly to keep up with his long-legged strides. She would introduce the President--after her own speech. The agenda gave her five minutes, but Foster knew she’d stretch that allotment.

His phone buzzed. Four Secret Service agents tensed for a moment, but Foster grinned at them as he pulled the iPhone from his jacket pocket, thankful that the military commsats were still working.

He squinted to read the text message on the tiny screen. “Urgent from Pentagon. Missile launched.”

That’s it, Foster thought. In half an hour we could all be dead.

ABL-1: Cockpit

“Look!” Kaufman pointed at the bright plume of rocket exhaust rising above the horizon. “That’s it!” Karen Christopher shouted.

“Turn into it!”

“Turning.”

She banked the big 747 to the left, swinging the plane so that its nose pointed toward the missile plume. Dumb jumbo jet turns like a freight train, Christopher said to herself, slow and ugly.

The colonel flicked a switch on her communications board. “Hartunian, they’ve launched.”

Down in the battle management compartment Harry heard the urgency in Colonel Christopher’s voice. “We’ve got them on the radar.”

His eyes scanned the console. Iodine and oxygen pressurized and ready to flow. All systems in the green.

“Taki?”

Sitting next to Harry, Nakamura’s lips were pressed into a thin, bloodless line. “This is it,” she muttered as her hands played over her console’s keyboard.

“Ranging laser,” Harry said.

“Acquisition.”

On the screen that displayed the ranging laser’s data Harry saw a thin yellow line curving slightly toward the right.

“Locked on!” Nakamura called out.

“Distance?”

“One hundred fourteen miles.” Too far, Harry thought. The COIL’s range isn’t more than a hundred miles.

“Armed and ready,” Taki called. Harry yelled, “Fire!”

“Firing.”

From deep in the plane’s innards Harry heard the thundering roar of the laser, like a rocket bellowing: iodine and oxygen racing down the main channel, mixing, streaming through the laser cavity and surrendering more than a million watts of pure energy.

“We’re on it,” Nakamura said. “We’re hitting it.”

But is the COIL delivering energy to do the job? Harry wondered. At this range--

The yellow line on Harry’s screen abruptly cut off. He blinked at it.

“Did we get it?”

In the cockpit, Colonel Christopher gaped at the explosion. It was too far away to hear anything, but they could see that the missile’s white smoky exhaust plume ended in an orange-red blossom of fire. “We hit it!” she shouted.

“Sure as hell did!” Kaufman echoed, staring out at the dirty gray cloud expanding out by the horizon.

“Bull’s-eye!” Christopher pumped a fist in the air. Kaufman laughed hoarsely. “Scratch one missile!”

“Where’s the other--”

Out of the corner of her eye Christopher saw the flash of a missile’s smoky exhaust streak straight into the 747’s number two engine. It exploded inside the nacelle, blowing the engine to bits. The plane bucked and slewed so badly the control yoke jerked out of Christopher’s hands.

“Jesus Christ!” Kaufman bellowed.

“We’ve been hit!” Christopher grabbed at the controls, but the 747 was sliding into a shallow dive, bucking like a wild horse, its left inboard engine nacelle shredded and aflame.

“Fire extinguishers, Obie!”

Kaufman, staring goggle-eyed at the flames streaming from where the engine nacelle had been, shuddered for a heartbeat, then slammed the fire extinguisher system’s number two button almost hard enough to punch through the control panel.

“Pull her up!” he yelled as he reached for the control yoke in front of him.

“Trying . ..” Christopher panted, pulling with all her strength on the unyielding yoke. The big plane was shaking so hard her helmet was jiggling on her head, nearly slipping over her eyes.

In the battle management compartment Harry was almost slammed off his seat. The safety harness cut into his shoulders painfully.

“What the hell was that?” Nakamura yelped.

“We’re going down!” he realized.

Rosenberg’s voice screamed in his headphone, high-pitched, scared, “What the fuck’s happening up there?”

We’re dead, Harry replied silently. We’re all dead. The plane was jolting and rattling so hard Harry thought it would fall apart any second.

Then Taki pointed a shaking finger at the radar screen. “They’ve launched the other missile!”

Christopher’s mind went strangely calm. One engine out, losing altitude. Altimeter spinning down like it’s on steroids. Glancing out her left window she saw that the fire was out. At least there weren’t any flames streaming from beneath the wing. She saw ugly gashes in the wing’s surface where pieces of the exploded engine had ripped through. A long slick of fuel from a ruptured tank glistened across the shredded wing’s top. At least it wasn’t on fire.

“Close off that tank,” she said to Kaufman. “Shift to the tanks that haven’t been punctured.”

Automatically, she powered down a little, her right hand easing back slightly on the master throttle. Plane flies okay on three engines, she told herself.

We can fly fine on three. Then a sour voice in her head asked, So why’d they put the fourth engine on her?

Automatically, she swiftly scanned the control panel. Pressurization’s holding okay, she saw. No shrapnel’s penetrated the fuselage. Not the pressurized sections, anyway.

Level off, she told herself. Get her level. The plane was still shaking, rattling, but not as badly as before, responding to the controls now. She shot a quick look at Kaufman. He had both hands locked on his control yoke, knuckles white, face whiter. The 747 was leveling out, the altimeter still winding down, but slower now. Shit, Christopher said to herself, we’ve only lost a couple thousand feet of altitude.

“Leveling out,” Kaufman said, his voice shaky.

“Yeah.”

“Colonel, they’ve launched the other missile!” Hartunian called.

Christopher bit back the reply that leaped into her mind: Listen, buddy, we’ve got enough to do just staying in the air now. Never mind your goddamned missiles.

Instead, she looked out the windshield and saw the bright plume streaking upward from the distant horizon.

“Point us at it!” Hartunian urged.

“We’ve been hit,” she said, as calmly as she could manage.

As if he hadn’t heard her, Hartunian demanded, “Get the nose up and point her toward that plume. Now! We’ve got less than a minute!”

She looked at Kaufman. “Let’s do what the man says, Obie. Get the nose up.”

“If we can.”

Grimly, Christopher tugged on her control yoke. The lumbering 747 responded slowly, grudgingly. But her nose went up slightly.

“We’re bouncing in and out of acquisition,” Nakamura shouted.

Harry felt the plane shaking, shuddering, and wondered how long she would hold together. The screens on his consoles were jittering in front of his eyes.

“Get him, Taki,” he said, growling. “You’ve got thirty seconds, maybe less.”

“Acquiring,” Nakamura said, her voice edging higher. “If they could just hold the plane steady . . .”

Harry saw the yellow line of the missile’s trajectory rising toward the top of his screen. In another few seconds the bird would be so high they couldn’t get the COIL to point at it.

“Locked on!”

Fire the bastard, Harry urged silently. He heard the rumble from deep in the 747’s innards: the COIL was running.

“Missed!” Nakamura snapped. Before Harry could say anything she muttered, “Firing again. Multiple pulses.”

The line on Harry’s screen reached the top of the display, then winked out. “Did we get him?”

Nakamura shook her head. “I don’t know!”

In the cockpit, Kaufman yelled, “You’re going to stall out!”

Christopher didn’t reply. The tech guys needed the nose aimed at the missile and the missile was rising fast. She eased the lumbering 747’s nose up, up, hoping they had enough airspeed to avoid a stall. She’ll drop like the Rock of Gibraltar if she goes into a stall, Christopher thought. The plane was still vibrating, jouncing along on three engines and a shredded wing. Come on, baby, you can do it. Just hold it for a few seconds. A few seconds more ... “Got it!” Kaufman yelped.

Another orange-red blossom of fire bloomed where the missile’s exhaust plume had been.

“We hit it!” Christopher agreed. She had a crazy impulse to lean over and plant a kiss on Kaufman’s round cheek. Instead she let the control yoke slide forward and the plane’s nose eased down.

“We did it,” Kaufman said, his voice hollow with wonder. “We shot both the bastards down.”

“We sure as hell did!”

Kaufman broke into a major-league grin.

“Let’s get this old bus back to Misawa,” said Christopher.

“If we can.”

Christopher started a right turn, away from the coast.

O’Banion called, “Oh-oh. Colonel, you better listen to this.”

“I repeat: American 747,” said a steely male voice in her headphone, “do not try to escape. You will follow us to DPRK air base and land there. Or we will shoot you down.”

The Pentagon: Situation Room

Brad Scheib pressed his hand against the earbud. Karen’s voice sounded strained, tense in the tiny speaker. He saw all the others in the room staring at him and knew he couldn’t say aloud what he wanted to tell her. I got you into this mess, Karen. I didn’t know you’d be flying the plane, I didn’t know you’d be on the hot seat. Don’t get yourself killed, honey. Come back to me. Come back.